Related resources for this article

Introduction

From a series of still photographs on film, motion pictures create the illusion of moving images. The name Hollywood itself evokes galaxies of images. The motion-picture industry did not start in Hollywood, and it did not stay only there. But for about a century this little section of Los Angeles, Calif., has brought hours of comedy and tragedy, song and dance, heroes and villains, cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, horror and slapstick, and romance and adventure to generations of moviegoers around the world.

Filmmakers create movies, but they also create celebrities—famous actors, actresses, and directors—whose lives have been chronicled in movie magazines and gossip columns, on television talk shows and the Internet, and in supermarket tabloids. Since the days of Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks in the 1920s, moviegoers have been as fascinated by performers’ real lives as by their on-screen performances.

Motion pictures are both an industry and an art form. The cinema has weathered many challenges—the competition of radio, television, and theater, public and private censorship, and scandals and investigations. In American filmmaking, the once-almighty “studio system,” dominated by a few corporate giants from 1927 to 1948, eventually gave way to creative and financial competition between less monopolistic large studios as well as many smaller production companies. But whether from Hollywood or elsewhere, the film industry’s product remains one of the most popular entertainment media in the world.

Filmmaking has never been confined to Hollywood. France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom have made remarkable contributions to the motion-picture arts. Mumbai (Bombay), India, has become a great moviemaking center, as has Hong Kong. Today, in fact, more movies are made annually in Bollywood—India’s answer to Hollywood—than anywhere else on the planet. Countries such as Iran have produced masterpieces, often in spite of the heavy hand of government censorship.

Tools and Materials of Filmmaking

Filmmakers use the same basic tools and techniques to produce most types of movies, from full-length features (which are the major motion-picture format), to short films, documentaries (which present and interpret factual material), and educational films. All motion pictures are based on an illusion of motion made possible by a phenomenon called persistence of vision. The brain holds onto a visual impression for 1/16 to 1/10 of a second after the eye has stopped looking at an illuminated image. When a series of pictures of an object is presented in rapid succession with the position of the object slightly altered in each picture, the brain links the different pictures into one continuous image, creating the illusion that the object is moving.

A simple way to demonstrate the illusion of motion is to draw a line in the lower right-hand corner of each page of a pad of paper, each time altering the angle a little in the same direction. If the pages are then riffled at a fast pace, the eye will perceive the illusion of a moving line.

In movies, persistence of vision is used to create the illusion of motion from still photographs. By means of a shutter that opens and closes at high speed, the motion-picture camera photographs a series of still images. Because most movie cameras record an image every 1/24 of a second, the differences between images are small. The illusion of motion is provided by the projector, which moves the film past a light source at the same speed at which the images were photographed. Persistence of vision causes the brain to perceive the separate images as a continuously moving scene.

The Camera

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

The primary filmmaking tool is the motion-picture camera, which records images on film. The camera houses unexposed film in a totally dark chamber called the forward magazine. Small, regularly spaced perforations called sprocket holes line one or both edges of the film. Gears grip the perforations and feed the film into an exposure chamber. A mechanical claw pulls the film into position behind the shutter, locking the film in place. The shutter opens, exposes an image onto the film, and closes. Then the claw, with an automatic pulldown movement, advances the film for the next exposure.

Each exposure is a single still photograph, or frame. Most cameras advance the film at a rate of 24 times a second. As the film moves through the camera, the exposed sections are fed into another totally dark chamber, the rear magazine.

Lenses

The camera’s lens transmits the image being photographed to the film. Different lenses produce different kinds of images. For each scene, the director of photography selects a lens that will give the kind of image he wants the audience to see.

A lens’s focal length affects the size of the image transmitted to the film, as well as the relative sharpness of objects in the image (its depth of field). A wide-angle lens has a short focal length and is used to obtain broad, distant views of an object in a scene. A long lens has a long focal length and provides a closer view of the object. With a telephoto lens, which has an even longer focal length, a close-up view of a distant object can be obtained. A zoom lens has a variable focal length, meaning it can be increased or decreased at will. This makes the zoom lens particularly useful in making newsreels, documentaries, and wildlife pictures, in which it is not always possible to shoot subjects at close range. It also allows the filmmaker to alter the distance to the subject during one take, or shot. Zoom lenses are also used on projectors in order to fill the different-sized screens with a picture.

As a lens transmits an image to film, it reduces the image’s size. During this process the lens refracts, or bends, the light rays of the image, causing some linear distortion in the photograph. A normal lens provides an image in which the horizontal and vertical lines appear almost straight and the objects within the frame appear in normal perspective and proportion. Other lenses are used to intentionally emphasize distortion, thereby creating special effects. A fisheye lens is a wide-angle lens that bends horizontal and vertical lines and greatly distorts relationships within the frame. This lens has been used to portray fantasies, dream sequences, and psychological impressions. A multiplying lens produces a number of side-by-side images of the same object.

Lenses also affect how movement is perceived on film. Normal lenses reproduce movement realistically. With lenses of greater focal length, movement toward and away from the camera appears to contract, or telescope, inward. With a lens of short focal length, movement appears faster than normal.

Film

The film on which images are made is a base strip of either cellulose acetate (a synthetic, plant-based material) or, more recently, Mylar or other polyester. The film base is coated with a light-sensitive mixture called an emulsion that retains images. This emulsion is a gelatin containing tiny undissolved crystals of silver halide. Film used to produce movies in color is coated with multiple layers of emulsion that are sensitive to different colors of the spectrum.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Film is generally classified by its approximate width. The larger the size of the film, the better the image quality. Most theatrical motion pictures are photographed on 35-millimeter film. Formerly, 70-millimeter film was used to produce “wide-screen” movies. Although that format is still used in projecting some films, wide-screen movies are now usually filmed in 35-millimeter and then enlarged. Some specialized formats, such as IMAX, are shot using extra-large 65-millimeter film that moves through the camera horizontally. IMAX movies are printed on 70-millimeter film, which includes a sound track. Amateur filmmakers usually use 8-millimeter film (or digital cameras), and 16-millimeter film is used for many nontheatrical purposes (such as business and industrial films).

Raw film stock is also graded according to its sensitivity to light, which varies according to the film’s emulsion coating. A fast, or high-speed, film requires less light to retain an image than a slow, or low-speed, film. Since the silver halide grains in the emulsion on fast film are larger than those on slow film, fast film generally has a grainier appearance when projected. Fast film provides a low degree of contrast between black and white tones; slow film provides a greater range of brightness and darkness.

Sound Equipment

In a finished movie, all sound is provided by a sound track that is part of the film. The sound track runs the length of the film on one side, parallel to the photographed images. But motion-picture sound is not originally recorded on the film with the images. The sound technician, or recordist, records the dialogue and other sound produced during filming on quarter-inch magnetic tape, just like that used in the music recording industry. This so-called double-system shooting requires careful matching, or synchronization, of sound and picture during the editing phases of filmmaking.

To synchronize (or sync) the picture and sound, both must be recorded at the same speed. In one system, a sync-generator automatically sends a signal pulse to the sound recorder via cable or wireless radio. The pulse rate represents the speed of the camera motor and is recorded on the sync-track of the sound tape. More-advanced systems use a time-code generator to produce numbers in “real time” on both film and tape. For each filmed shot, the time-code generator is set to zero. When the camera and film are running, the generator produces numbers that represent the hours, minutes, and seconds that have elapsed and the number of image frames that have been recorded. Corresponding information is recorded on the “address” track of the audio tape.

The initial recorded sound—as well as the music, sound effects, and rerecorded dialogue to be added—are transferred from regular magnetic tape to a special sprocketed 35-millimeter magnetic tape for editing. At the very last stages of postproduction (everything that occurs after the images and sound are first recorded), the final edited sound track is converted to an optical sound negative. The optical sound negative is a film format that allows sound impulses to be “read” by the projector’s light mechanism. The edited camera negative is combined with the synchronized sound track negative into a composite print, called the answer print. After further adjustments to both sound and image tracks, the release prints are created for distribution to theaters.

Various digital sound formats that can reproduce several distinct channels of sound were introduced in the 1990s. In Digital Theater Systems (DTS), the sound track is recorded on compact discs (CDs) and a time-code track is encoded on the film. During projection, an optical reader “reads” the time codes, which the CD player uses to synchronize the sound to the film images. Other digital sound systems encode the audio track as binary information (representing 1s and 0s) on the film—between the sprocket holes in Dolby Digital systems and along the edge of the film in the Sony Dynamic Digital Sound (SDDS) system.

The Projector

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

The chief parts of the projector are the picture head and the soundhead. The film is fed continuously into the projector from its reel in the upper magazine. At regularly spaced start-and-stop intervals, a device (either a mechanical claw or an intermittent sprocket) draws the film past the lens of the picture head. As each frame comes into position behind the lens, it is held still for an instant. A shutter opens, thereby allowing a beam of light to pass through the film and the lens and so to project the image onto the screen. When the shutter closes, the film is again jerked down slightly, and the next frame is positioned behind the lens. When the film is projected at the same speed at which it was photographed, the motion seen on the screen appears the same as the motion that was photographed. This is called undercranking and overcranking the camera.

For film with a digital sound track, a special reader scans the binary audio information on the film, and a processor converts the information into sound. To play an analog sound track, the film is drawn through the soundhead after it passes through the picture head. It moves in a smooth, continuous motion, rather than intermittently, as for the picture track. This is because any interruption or variation in sound speed would be heard and would seem unnatural. To allow for the differences in motion, the soundhead sits some distance away from the picture head on the projector; in 35-millimeter production, the sound track for each frame is usually printed exactly 21 frames ahead of the corresponding image.

In the soundhead, a narrow beam of light is projected through the sound track onto a light-sensitive device that converts the light energy into electrical energy. This device, the optical pickup, reads the differences in the sound encoded on the film. Film may encode analog sound in one of two ways: through variations in density (from opaque black to almost clear) or variations in area (differences in the width of a clear area that is edged in opaque black).

The impulses read by the pickup are strengthened by amplifiers and then carried by wire to the movie theater’s speakers, where they are then converted into vibrations of sound. For most feature films, dialogue comes from the center speaker, music and on-screen sound effects from the left and right speakers, and off-screen sounds from the “surrounds” (speakers placed along the sides and rear of the theater). Finally, the film passes from the soundhead to a second reel that is housed in the lower magazine, where it is rewound.

The length of a film is measured in feet. There are 16 frames in each foot of 35-millimeter film. Therefore, 90 feet (27.5 meters) of 35-millimeter film will pass through the projector every minute at the standard sound projection speed of 24 frames per second. A feature-length film lasting 100 minutes is 9,000 feet (2,750 meters) long. In order to make the handling of films more convenient, they are divided into reels.

Movie theaters receive a 35-millimeter exhibition print mounted on 2,000-foot (610-meter) reels, which contain 22 minutes of film. A typical feature film is thus five or six reels long. For many years, screening a film required four or five changes of projector. Circular cue marks in the upper right-hand corner of the picture told the projectionist when to change reels. Today, single-screen theaters are about the only places where 2,000-foot reels are used.

For larger commercial theaters, the exhibition print is usually “made up”—that is, the reels are spliced (fitted and joined) together and put onto two larger reels, so that the projectionist only needs to make a single changeover. Alternatively, all the reels may be spliced together for use in an external setup called the platter system, which can run an entire feature without changeovers or rewinding. When a film is made up into large reels, up to three auditoriums may be served from the same projection booth. The platter system is used in theaters with more than three screens.

Artistic Elements of Film

Whether a film is made by a large motion-picture studio, a small group of craftspeople working together, or a single individual, it combines several major elements, including story, direction, acting, camera work, and editing. An independent filmmaker may write his own film story, plan and execute his own camera work, and edit his own film. In large commercial productions, however, these jobs are carried out by different individuals and production crews under the overall supervision of a producer.

Although the producer’s job is defined differently by different companies, the general responsibilities also involve overseeing the business end of making a movie, including the legal and financial aspects. A producer for a large studio may handle mostly the production and postproduction business of getting a picture completed. An independent producer usually has those and many more responsibilities that, in a large studio, may be handled by entire departments. Before production even begins, for example, much effort goes into developing the idea and finding financing for the film. After the film is completed, the independent producer must find a distributor so that it can be systematically exhibited and, later, transferred to and sold in video and other media formats.

Story and Script

In essence, a film subject is no different from the subject of any other storytelling art. It may, for example, focus on past, present, or future events, feature a group of people or an individual, or portray social conditions or the influence of an idea. Subjects may be treated romantically or analytically, realistically or as fantasy, or in any number of other ways.

Some motion-picture stories are originals, written specifically for the medium of film. Others are adapted from stage and television plays, novels, short stories, biographies, and other published materials. A screenwriter, filmmaker, or production company buys the right to adapt these materials for the screen. A few filmmakers do not use a written text, preferring to improvise, with their actors, the specific actions and dialogue around a general story or situation.

Practices may vary from country to country, but in Western filmmaking the term script or screenplay usually refers to the written dialogue and descriptions required to understand the story. A screenplay usually reads much like a stage play, leaving details to the imagination. A shooting script, or production script, on the other hand, is a very specific plan used in the actual making of a film. It contains all dialogue or narration as well as details of the camera work, sound, and other technical elements. It is usually arranged in the order that scenes are to be shot, rather than in final viewing order.

Structurally, the script is composed of numbered shots and scenes. A shot, or take, is generally described as what is photographed during a single running of the camera. A scene is a continuous, unified action occurring at a single time and place. It is usually composed of a series of shots, though it may be only a single shot. For each shot and scene, the script specifies the action to take place, the nature of the image that will appear on the screen (such as a close-up, a distance shot, or a particular camera angle), and the setting and sound elements to be emphasized.

The Director

Maximum Film Distribution

The director is traditionally the person who has creative control over the production of a film. Directors translate the material in the script into a motion picture. They guide the composition of shots, the lighting of scenes, and the film’s overall pace and rhythm. The director is the one person who must have a complete view of the film project. The director works with and shapes the contributions of virtually everyone involved, to give the final film a consistent look and meaning.

In the early days of commercial filmmaking and the “studio system,” the goal was basically to churn out as many interesting and understandable movies as possible. The director’s job was to do that quickly and economically by coordinating and overseeing the work of the actors and other personnel. Strong and proven directors were often given more creative opportunity. Today—with larger budgets, longer production and postproduction schedules, and greater artistic freedom—directors are ultimately responsible for a film’s style, structure, and quality. They are also often held most responsible for its artistic and financial success or failure.

Sometimes a director serves as a unifying artist among creative equals, sharing his vision with the director of photography, the art director, the costumer, the special-effects designer, the actors, the editor, and others. Sometimes the role is more that of an artistic manager, who must juggle the demands of the script with those of, say, the lighting technician, a temperamental actor, and uncooperative weather. And at other times, the director is the film’s “author” and absolute authority, whose decisions are final and not to be questioned.

But a good director is perhaps most usefully considered a problem solver. The director takes the resources at hand—the technology, the budget, and the skills, knowledge, and talents of the other artists and crew—and looks for interesting, effective solutions to the script’s dramatic or visual challenges. A director’s style may be described as the distinctive solutions, or “techniques,” he uses when given a story or scene, together with a distinct preference for certain themes, ideas, or kinds of stories. Those solutions may involve specific types of visual images, highly individualistic camera work, unique styles of acting, or distinctive pacing of the films.

Film Designers and Crew

Before shooting begins, the director collaborates with other design artists to make sure that the film’s look and sound will work together to achieve the final effect the director has in mind. Creating an appropriate and unified “visual language” for the film is largely the responsibility of the production designer. This specialist coordinates the efforts of others, including the designers of the costumes, lighting, and sets. An art director (sometimes the same person as the production designer) oversees the preparation of the sets and other physical interior spaces that will be used in shooting the film.

The credits at the end of a movie attest to the large number of people involved in making a feature film. Most of these individuals are part of the production crew, the men and women specializing in different crafts who do the hands-on work of making the film. The director, for example, is usually aided by one or more assistant directors (ADs). A script supervisor keeps detailed records of shots and scenes, noting any departures from the written script. The gaffer, or head lighting technician, oversees the lighting grips—the people who mount, place, and adjust the lighting equipment. Grips are also responsible for the other equipment on the set, such as scenery and cameras. The director of photography (DP), or chief cinematographer, guides the crew of camera operators in capturing the shots and scenes in accord with the film director’s wishes.

Both studios and independent specialty shops and rental facilities keep or create large stores of the props (or properties, such as cell phones, silverware, guns, and food), set pieces (such as furniture), and costumes used in films. The clothing and costumes designed or selected by the costume designer are managed by wardrobe supervisors. Makeup artists style and maintain the hair and any facial or other body cosmetics the actors require.

Actors and Acting

Obviously, some actors are chosen for leading roles in films again and again for their box-office appeal. They may even be noted more as screen personalities rather than for their exceptional acting ability. But, whether casting happens mainly for reasons of celebrity or for talent and versatility, a performer must understand certain basics of film acting to create a satisfying character on-screen.

Acting for film requires techniques and approaches different from those required for the stage—though many actors are skilled in both media. Because the camera can come in close on a film actor and can record the performance from all sides, very natural and even particularly low-key performances are the preferred method for most modern-day film characterizations. The stage performer’s exaggerated (or “projected”) vocal and physical technique have little or no place on film.

On the stage an actor goes through his role from beginning to end, usually in chronological order. For film, however, the actor must be able to perform the scenes out of sequence and often days apart in time. For economic reasons, a shooting schedule is usually arranged so that all the scenes using one location or one set are filmed together, no matter what their order in the film. The film actor must be able to bring the character alive “on demand,” and for the few minutes that make up each movie shot or scene. Furthermore, scenes are often shot and reshot many times, sometimes for performance reasons but often because of technical concerns, such as changes in lighting, camera angles, lenses, and other details. And each time, the actor’s work must appear fresh and convincing, despite many interruptions and long hours of waiting. For a character to seem believable and consistent throughout the film, the actor must be aware from scene to scene of the character’s emotional state and development in relation to the story’s events.

The acting performance a film audience sees is ultimately determined by the editor and the director through the editing process. During editing, the various shots and scenes are selected or deleted, trimmed, rearranged, and fitted together into the final film.

Camera Work

No matter how many people are involved in a film production, most of their efforts are aimed at creating images to be caught by the camera. The essence of filmmaking is knowing how to compose the images to be filmed and how to use the camera to capture the images in exactly the desired way. This is the art of cinematography.

Shooting the film

Most films are a product of teamwork. In planning the photography for each shot, the director works closely with the director of photography (DP), or chief cinematographer. The DP brings to the job a knowledge of shot composition, film materials, optics, lighting, and color. Although the DP seldom operates the camera himself, he is responsible for the artistic positioning and movement of the camera or cameras. Other members of the camera crew include the camera operators, who physically run the cameras, and the assistant camera operators, who load film, mount and focus lenses, and maintain the camera equipment. Directors often give their cinematographers credit for their films’ visual style. But most cinematographers say that they only solve the technical problems that directors present to them.

The kind of camera used for a shot depends on the visual effect desired. Large studio cameras are heavy and difficult to move. For basic shots, each large camera is mounted on a tripod apparatus. This equipment can be smoothly adjusted for repositioning and evenly moved over short distances on casters (wheels or rollers). For greater range and ease of movement, the camera and operator are mounted on a dolly (a wheeled platform) that can be propelled around the set. Rails or tracks may be laid to transport a dolly over uneven surfaces. And to film shots and scenes from above the action, the camera and operator can be lifted by a crane that sits on a dolly. Smaller, lightweight cameras can be held by hand during shooting, usually by means of a body brace and a stabilizing device such as the Steadicam, which was introduced in the 1970s.

Composing the shots

A film is composed of images that change from frame to frame. In composing each shot, the filmmaker must consider how to precisely direct the viewer’s attention and how the elements within a shot relate to each other, as well as how each image will relate to the images that precede and follow it. Composing a shot involves the placement and movement of people and objects in the frame, the position and movement of the camera, and the lighting of the subject.

In the process called framing, the filmmaker includes only what is important to achieve the desired goals and to give a shot its force. The filmmaker plans how far from the subject the camera will be, what kind of lens he will use, and the viewpoint, or angle, from which the shot will be made.

David W. Griffith Corporation

Camera distance and the lens determine the scale, or relative sizes, of human figures and objects in the image. A shot in which figures appear small against their background is a long shot; a medium shot shows full figures just within the limits of the frame; a medium-close shot shows one figure from the waist up; a close-up, only the face; and an extreme, or big, close-up, only a portion of the face. The master shot usually shows an entire set in order to locate and give perspective to the other shots. The angle of a shot depends upon the effect the filmmaker is trying to achieve. For example, a shot taken from above can make a figure appear insignificant; one taken from below can make a figure appear important—and often menacing.

Artisan Entertainment

A shot may be made by moving the camera in a number of ways or from a single viewpoint with a stationary camera. Turning the camera smoothly in a horizontal movement that sweeps around a scene creates a movement known as panning (from the word panorama). Turning it up or down through a 90-degree angle creates a movement known as tilting. Panning and tilting are the basic movements of the camera from a fixed position. By combining movement of the whole camera with panning and tilting, the filmmaker can create very complex movement and effects. As indicated earlier, cameras can be moved by means of a dolly—in what are known as tracking or trucking shots—or a crane. Some filmmakers mount their cameras on automobiles, airplanes, helicopters, or other moving objects. Handheld cameras are sometimes moved jerkily on purpose, to simulate the viewpoint of actual human movement.

Another aspect of camera movement is its pace. A slow and lingering movement, for example, may indicate careful thought and exploration of detail. Quick camera movements might suggest a sudden rush of emotion.

Lighting

Courtesy of Janus Films

How an image appears on light- and color-sensitive film depends on how the subject is lit. Light can bring out contours, create depth and mood, and give dramatic effect. It can also enhance or otherwise modify colors. Because images on motion-picture film are constantly changing, each shot presents particular lighting problems. By controlling the intensity, direction, and diffusion (spreading or scattering) of light, the filmmaker models those images.

The amount and kind of light needed depend on the desired effect and on the film used. To determine the light needed, the filmmaker uses a light meter to measure the intensity of the light falling on various areas of the subject or scene. Both the intensity and the quality of any light vary as the camera angle is changed.

The main source of illumination is called the key light; the direction from which it comes is always of major importance in composing any shot. The key light is frequently supplemented by subsidiary lighting from any direction.

The chief source of light for outdoor shooting is sunlight. Indoors, light is furnished by carbon arc lamps, incandescent bulbs, and quartz bulbs, mounted in a variety of housings. The basic indoor lights are spotlights and floodlights. Spotlights throw a beam of concentrated, intense light over a small area. They can be directed and focused at will. Floodlights disperse a soft light over a wide area and are used primarily to fill in the shadows caused by spotlights.

Various devices can further soften, diffuse, and direct light. Outdoors, metal reflectors are positioned to direct and change the quality of sunlight. Cloths and canopies may be used to soften sunlight. Indoors, placing frosted glass, gelatin, silk, or gauze over the lamps or the camera’s lens can modify harsh light or alter tones. Lens filters are used for the same purpose. Lighting effects can be further manipulated in the film development lab, after shooting has finished.

Special effects and techniques in filming

Many techniques have been devised for overcoming shooting problems, creating illusions, and saving on production costs. For example, scale models (miniatures) may be filmed to create such events as earthquakes, floods, fires, and explosions. Within the industry, “special effects” refers to effects created on the movie set, while “visual effects” are those created by manipulating the film during postproduction. In recent years, the use of computer-generated images (CGI), developed largely in connection with animation, has greatly enhanced filmmakers’ ability to combine various shooting and postproduction techniques to attain realistic results. (Seecartoons.)

Today’s effects departments rely heavily on the optical printer. This device—basically a camera and a projector that operate at the same time—makes it possible to photograph a photograph. Optical printers can create effects such as dissolves and slow and fast motion. For a dissolve, the end of one film scene and the beginning of another are overlapped and copied onto a third film so that the first scene seems to melt or fade away as the next emerges. For slow motion, each frame of a shot is reprinted two or three times. Printing every other frame (skip printing) speeds up action. This may be used for comic effects, but it also allows action sequences such as car crashes to be filmed at a slow (and safe) pace and then sped up to appear to happen in “real time.”

In the past, rear-projection (or process) shots were extensively used to film background movement, as when two actors talked during a car ride. The action shots were filmed in front of a transparent screen on which film of a moving background was projected from behind. With the introduction of color film, this technique looked increasingly artificial.

John Bramley—Marvel/Sony Pictures. All rights reserved.

Optical printers are now used to replace part of an image filmed in one location with background shots taken in another, or with backgrounds of painted scenes or still photographs. These so-called matte shots combine the foreground of one shot (usually including the actors) with the background of another shot. The unwanted parts of each are masked off (or blanked out), and then the corresponding parts are combined (or composited) through optical printing into one piece of film. The matte process is sometimes used to show an actor playing two roles in the same scene or to combine shots of studio sets with shots of scale models, paintings, or photographs.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Universal Pictures Inc./Wing Nut Films

A technique called blue- or green-screen photography, combined with optical printing, can create a very convincing version of unlikely or dangerous phenomena, such as an actor flying through the air or dangling from a tall building. First, the actor is filmed performing in front of a special blue or green background that is lit from behind. Through special processing, a print of the film is made with the blue or green background removed, so that the actor appears against a transparent background. After further processing, the actor’s figure is reproduced as an opaque silhouette. This silhouette is then placed with a separately photographed background in an optical printer. Finally, all the elements are printed together in a composite.

Sound

The sound tracks of most films are made up of both synchronous sound—sound recorded as the film is being shot—and postsynchronous sound—sound recorded and added after shooting. Separate sound tracks are usually made for dialogue (the voice track), music, and sound effects. All tracks are later combined into the final sound track during a mix, or rerecording, session.

On-set recording is handled by members of the sound crew, who adjust microphones to follow the action and to keep them out of the camera’s range. They must ensure that the sound of each voice is consistent throughout the film. They must also make sure that the directions from which voices come correspond with the movement of the actors and that the sound perspective—the distance from which sound is heard—matches the visual perspective.

Often, dialogue recorded during shooting is used only as a guide for a voice track made in a recording studio. The actors’ scenes are projected in the studio over and over again until the actors can exactly match the timing of the picture track. Then their lines are newly recorded for inclusion in a final voice track. This process is known as dubbing. Today, digital processes and a system called automatic dialogue replacement allow sound engineers to manipulate voices even further, for perfect lip sync.

Dubbing is also used to provide translated voice tracks for foreign films and to substitute the voices of singers for the voices of actors unable to perform the songs in a musical. Some films use a narrator to tell part of the story or, as in educational and documentary films, to provide information. Narration is recorded separately and later edited into the sound track.

Sound effects

All film sound other than dialogue, narration, and music is called sound effects. Some sound effects correspond to the action in the visual image—for example, as waves are seen breaking on the shore, the synchronous sound of breaking waves is heard. Other sound effects are used to suggest action occurring off-screen. Both types of sound effects are used to heighten the sense of reality in a film—to convince viewers that they are “there.”

A sound-effects track is usually recorded separately and is as carefully composed as a visual track to convey just what the filmmaker wants. Large film studios and specialty service companies keep vast libraries of prerecorded standard sound effects. Special sound effects may have to be created for specific uses. A much-used technique called foleying is similar to dialogue dubbing, except that sound effects are generated in sync with the picture track.

Music

Music in films is usually either source music, which the characters can hear, or scored music, generally background orchestration that underscores the dramatic action for the audience. For film musicals, the instrumental accompaniment and vocal tracks are first recorded in a studio. This playback track is then played on the film set, where the performers lip-sync and match their actions or dancing to what they hear.

More broadly, though, music is used in films to support the visual images and the action. It helps create dramatic effects, emphasize rhythm, movement, and pace, and reflect and establish moods. Like some operas, some film scores contain motifs that are identified with certain characters or that underlie certain scenes.

Although some films use existing music for their scores, most films have original musical scores composed for them. Because of the complexity of scoring a film, composers work from an edited version of the film. First, during a “spotting” session, the director, music editor, and, often, the composer decide which scenes will have music and when it will begin and end. The composer builds the score in a series of short selections that are keyed to scenes. Once the music has been performed and recorded, the music editor breaks down each use of music, or cue, into fractions of seconds. The music track becomes part of the final sound track, which, through mixing, becomes a composite of all the tracks made for dialogue, narration, sound effects, and music.

Editing the Film

Editing a film consists of selecting and putting together visual images provided by the camera and aural images provided by the sound tracks to form a single, continuous film. Editing, or “cutting,” is one of the most important and creative aspects of filmmaking. The skill and judgment of the film editor in combining and structuring thousands of shots and sounds determine whether or not the film story that emerges conveys the meaning and emotional impact intended by the writer and the director. Editing sometimes begins only after all the shooting has been completed, but often it goes on while shooting is still in progress.

After each day’s shooting, positive prints, called rushes or dailies, are made of the day’s work. The director and the editor view the rushes, selecting the particular takes the editor will use and arranging them as a “rough cut.” The editor works with duplicate prints of the selected takes, called work prints, or with digital duplicates on a computer. The corresponding sound tracks are also duplicates, called work tracks. Work prints contain duplicates of the edge numbers from the original raw film stock. These numbers are imprinted successively once per foot on the film border, so the assembled work print can be matched to the original footage. Once the sound and image tracks are synchronized, both can be marked with identical ink “rubber” numbers so that synchronism can be maintained or quickly reestablished by sight.

The work print goes through many stages from rough to fine cut. For each shot and scene, the editor juggles such factors as camera placement, relation between sound and image, performance quality, and the rhythm established by each editorial cut. During this process, decisions are also made about special visual and sound effects, computer manipulation of and additions to the photographic images, rerecording and dubbing options, music, and the like.

Traditionally, editing work has been done on a console with equipment that allows the editor to splice, play back, and synchronize the images and sound. Via the console, the editor can run the sound and images in sync or separately and at variable speeds. From the 1930s to the 1980s, most film editing was done on either a vertically arranged machine, called a Moviola, or on a horizontal flatbed machine. Editing a feature-length film on such equipment usually involved reducing hundreds of thousands of feet of expensive film and sound track to fewer than 10,000. Assistants logged scene, take, and roll numbers, and cuts marked in grease pencil were spliced together with cement or tape.

Today, however, computer and video editing equipment have drastically affected the editing process. In fact, physical cutting and splicing may soon be entirely things of the past. Recording the original filmed material onto laser digital videodiscs (DVDs) allows editors to access, play, and assemble various takes and scenes rapidly and easily, at the touch of a keypad. The computer generates time-code information to identify the list of edits, called the edit-decision list, of scenes and takes. In the final editing stage, the editor matches the time-code information against the edge numbers on the original film.

Editing techniques

The editor builds thousands of separate shots into scenes, scenes into sequences, and sequences into the full film story. By the shots he chooses and by the way he relates them to one another and cuts them together, he sets the mood, develops the action, and establishes the passage of time in each scene.

The most basic transition from one shot to another is the cut, in which the editor joins two shots, each showing different aspects of the same scene or action. The editor may compress time in a scene by jump cutting, or joining a shot showing the beginning of an action to one showing the action being completed. What happens in between is left out. A jump cut may, for instance, show an actor starting to cross a room and then show him at the other side of the room, omitting his walk through it.

Goskino/photograph, the Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive, New York City

Goskino/photograph, the Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive, New York City

Courtesy of the Rosa Madell Film Library; photograph from the Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive, New York City

Time may be expanded by intercutting—that is, after an action has begun, inserting shots of the action from different angles or distances, or shots showing details of the action, such as a face or an actor’s hands, and then returning to the original action. Intercuts may also involve shots of a different setting or character. Cutting back and forth between the original scene and the intercut scene is called crosscutting. This form of parallel action is often used to create suspense. Intercutting may also be used to create a montage sequence—a series of brief shots that show different but simultaneously occurring details of an action or that show fragments of a variety of events related to one another by the story. Montage can be used to either expand or compress the passage of time. (In many areas of filmmaking, the word montage also means “editing” or “cutting.”)

Time in a scene is also affected by the length of the shots and how rapidly or slowly they succeed one another. By progressively shortening the length of each shot in a series, for example, the editor can create a sense of rapidly quickening time. The pace of a film can also be increased by a sudden cut from one scene to an unrelated scene or by flash cutting, which is the technique of inserting a few almost fragmentary scenes between two longer scenes.

A change from one scene to another, or from one sequence to another, usually occurs when there is a change in the location of the action or a lapse in time or both. To link different scenes and sequences, a number of optical effects are used. One of these is the fade: the last shot in a scene gradually fades into darkness (a fade-out), and out of the darkness a new scene gradually appears (a fade-in). In the dissolve (mentioned earlier), one shot begins to fade out as the image of the next shot begins to appear; for a few seconds the two shots are superimposed. In the transitional device known as the wipe, the last image of one scene is gradually pushed off the screen by the expanding image of the next scene. The wipe may move across the screen in a number of ways, such as vertically, horizontally, diagonally, or like a fan opening.

Sound editing

In preparing the sound track, the editor must determine how each sound element relates to the visual images and how it relates to previous sounds, simultaneous sounds, and the sounds that will follow it. The final combining of the dialogue, sound effect, and music tracks onto one composite sound track synchronous with the picture is variously known as mixing, rerecording, or dubbing. Mixing takes place at a special console equipped with separate controls for each track to adjust loudness and various aspects of sound quality. Computerized consoles allow the sound mixer to make changes to any one of the sound tracks without having to remix it with the others.

When the master magnetic tape is finished, it is copied onto an optical sound negative. This, in turn, is composited in sync with the film negative in preparation for making the finished motion picture and the copies for release to theaters.

Censorship and Regulation

Almost since the inception of the film industry, there has existed some form of controversy over what is suitable to be shown on the motion-picture screen. Two methods have been used to control motion-picture content—self-regulation by the industry and censorship by governments, which may require films to be edited or may ban them outright.

In addition, various movie ratings systems attempt to prevent younger viewers from seeing material deemed inappropriate for them. In many countries—including the United States, Canada, Australia, and in Europe—film boards classify movies according to the minimum age a person should be in order to see the film. The boards may be independent organizations or government agencies, and their ratings may represent guidelines only or firm restrictions. The British film board has issued such ratings since 1913.

To avoid federal censorship, the major American movie studios in 1922 formed an organization—which later became the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)—to set standards for film production. In 1934 the organization began enforcing its Production Code, which detailed what it found unsuitable to be shown on-screen—including prostitution, homosexuality, kidnapping, drug addiction, interracial marriage, and many other situations. Although the restrictions were technically voluntary, they held great force since the members of the association controlled the distribution and exhibition of nearly all films in the United States. The MPAA liberalized the Production Code in the 1950s and ’60s before replacing it with a ratings system in 1968. Today the system classifies films into five categories: G, for general audiences; PG, parental guidance suggested; PG-13, may be inappropriate for children under age 13; R, restricted to adults over 17 or children accompanied by an adult; NC-17, no children 17 or under admitted.

Film Awards and Festivals

The most prominent motion-picture awards in the United States are the Oscars, presented each year by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The academy was founded in 1927 in Hollywood and two years later began giving awards for achievement in many categories of filmmaking. The awards carry considerable status and often contribute to a film’s commercial success. Other major American awards include the Golden Globes, bestowed by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and those of the National Society of Film Critics, awarded by reviewers from major United States media outlets. In Great Britain, the annual BAFTA awards—the Orange British Academy Film Awards—are presented by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, in association with the Orange mobile telephone company.

Influential prizes are also awarded by the juries of film societies and festivals. The world’s first film festival was held in Venice, Italy, in 1932. It remains among the most noteworthy international festivals, along with the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, which was established in France in 1947. In the 1980s Robert Redford and others established the Sundance Institute, which sponsors the annual Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. This festival is regarded as a key showcase for new talent. Other major international film festivals take place in Berlin; London; New York City; Chicago; Toronto and Vancouver, Canada; San Sebastián, Spain; and Sydney, Australia. Special festivals for short films, documentaries, and animation are also held internationally.

History of Motion Pictures

Motion pictures were made possible by the inventions of many people. Some were interested in how images could be projected, some in how images could be recorded on different materials, some in the phenomenon of motion itself, and some in problems of vision. Late in the 19th century their discoveries were combined by others to provide the basic tools of film. Still others learned to use these tools and developed the art and the techniques of cinematography.

Long before anyone thought of recording moving images on films and projecting them, however, people had been fascinated by such popular entertainments as mechanical peep shows, Asian shadow plays, and shows using the magic lantern, a kind of early slide projector. Most of these devices told simple stories or revealed the wonders of the world by means of static drawings. Action was indicated by changes in the position of figures or objects from one picture to the next. Movement was not usually recorded, though a few experimental magic-lantern slides had intricate moving parts that did indeed suggest movement on the screen.

Inventing the Tools

The first real steps toward motion pictures were the result of experiments in the persistence of vision. Investigation of the subject was stimulated by a scientific paper on this phenomenon presented by Peter Mark Roget in 1824. Roget’s paper led people to try to build devices to test his theory.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

In 1832 Joseph A.F. Plateau in Ghent, Belgium, and Simon Ritter von Stampfer in Vienna, Austria, independently discovered the same method for creating the illusion of motion from a series of still pictures. They used a flat disk perforated with a number of evenly spaced slots. Around the rim of the disk on one side were an equal number of hand-drawn figures representing successive phases of movement. While holding the device with the figures facing a mirror, the viewer spun the disk and looked through the slots—and the figures reflected in the mirror appeared to move. Plateau’s device, the phenakistoscope, and Stampfer’s, the stroboscope, led to the invention of more elaborate devices using the same principle, such as the zoetrope. Such optical “toys” became popular in 19th-century homes.

The next steps toward motion pictures were taken between 1845 and 1853 by Baron Franz von Uchatius, an Austrian military officer. He combined the revolving-disk principle with the magic lantern to project a series of drawings on a wall or screen, so they could be viewed by a number of people at once.

Meanwhile, others were pioneering the development of photography. By the middle of the 19th century, still photographs began to replace drawings on optical disks. By 1870 inventors in the United States and England had developed devices in which posed still photographs of motion, mounted on a revolving disk, passed between a light source and a lens for projection before an audience.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, transferred from the Library (1991.1135.9), www. metmuseum.org

By 1877 the increased speed of photographic emulsions and improved camera shutters made it possible to photograph rapidly moving subjects. To study the gait of a running horse, Eadweard Muybridge, an English-born photographer, set up a row of 12 (and later 24) cameras that had electric shutter controls. As a horse ran by the cameras, it tripped strings that activated the shutters and exposed the plates. In this way he made the first photographs of unposed, continuous motion.

Muybridge’s work led to many experiments in motion photography aimed at achieving the same results with a single camera. This was first accomplished in 1882 by French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey, who was also studying the movement of living things. Marey perfected the “photographic gun,” which was shaped like a rifle but had a lens in the muzzle and photographic dry plates in the chamber. With only one pull of its trigger, 12 exposures were made in rapid succession. Later, by using emulsified paper film instead of dry plates, Marey was able to take about 100 pictures a second. His paper film, however, could not be projected.

The next major step was the development in 1887 of a light-sensitive emulsion on celluloid film by Hannibal Goodwin, an American amateur photographer from Newark, N.J. Soon after, American inventor George Eastman marketed a similar transparent, flexible film to be used with the Kodak camera he invented. Although celluloid film, a plant-based material, was highly flammable, it could be mass-produced in rolls, rapidly exposed by intermittent motion, quickly passed through a projecting device, and easily wound. French-born Louis-Augustin Le Prince in 1888 patented a machine to film and project images using celluloid film.

U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Edison National Historic Site

The Bettmann Archive

The first people generally credited with using celluloid film for motion pictures were the American inventor Thomas A. Edison and his assistant William K.L. Dickson, who were trying to provide visual illustrations to supplement the sound recordings of the phonograph. By 1890 they had developed the Kinetograph, a motion-picture camera that used Eastman film. To view the film, the Edison laboratory developed the Kinetoscope, a peep-show type of machine in a cabinet. The machine ran a continuous loop of about 50 feet (15 meters) of 35-millimeter film, driven by sprockets. A revolving shutter allowed the viewer, who peered through a peephole, a brief glimpse of each image.

In April 1894 the first Kinetoscope parlor opened at 1155 Broadway in New York City. It was an arcade containing banks of Kinetoscope machines, which featured films of vaudeville acts, Wild West and circus shows, and other entertainments. They were filmed at the “Black Maria,” the world’s first film studio, built by Edison at West Orange, N.J., in 1892–93. By the end of 1894, other Kinetoscope parlors had opened in the United States and Europe.

The success of Edison’s machines inspired other experimenters. In 1895 a number of new motion-picture cameras and projection devices—some within the same machine—were demonstrated in the United States and Europe. The most successful was the Cinématographe—a combination camera, printer, and projector—invented by Louis and Auguste Lumière in France. They gave their first private film show in March 1895, and in December they began public showings at the Grand Café in Paris. These were almost immediately popular, and in 1896 the Lumières converted a room at the café into the world’s first cinema theater. The Cinématographe spread rapidly through Europe, and in 1896 it was imported into the United States.

To meet the competition of films projected on a screen, Edison arranged to manufacture the Vitascope, a projector developed by Thomas Armat and Charles Francis Jenkins in the United States. The Armat-Jenkins projector was the first American one to use the principle of intermittent motion, allowing each frame to remain stationary on the screen for a brief time. Like the Europeans, Edison also developed a portable motion-picture camera that could take films anywhere. In April 1896 Edison’s first public performance using the Vitascope opened at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall in New York City with films of prizefighters, dancing girls, a scene from a play, and ocean waves. With the development of the Cinématographe and Vitascope, all the basic tools of cinematography were finally available.

Early Films: The Silent Era Begins

The novelty of the first motion pictures quickly wore off and inspired filmmakers to all kinds of experiments with the camera to keep their audiences. Both the length and the variety of films had increased by the turn of the century. Filmmakers learned how to fake fights, news events, and foreign settings, and they freely borrowed one another’s ideas and plots. (Copyright law in the United States did not explicitly apply to motion pictures until 1912.) Some filmmakers, however, provided actual coverage of news events, such as the inauguration of United States President William McKinley and action at the front in the Boer War (1899–1902). Travelogues were filmed worldwide, filmed advertisements began to appear, and short science films were made with the aid of the microscope.

By 1905 many of the basic techniques of cinematography and film editing had been tried. At first, action was filmed by only a single camera operating from a fixed position. Gradually, filmmakers learned how to pan, intercut two different scenes, use the close-up, and create dissolves and other effects with their lenses.

In France, independently but at about the same time, Alice Guy-Blaché and magician Georges Méliès explored visual tricks in both shooting and editing film. Guy directed what is usually credited as the first narrative (storytelling) moving picture, The Cabbage Fairy, in 1896. She created the film in her capacity as Léon Gaumont’s secretary, to demonstrate the entertainment possibilities of the motion-picture camera he manufactured. She and Méliès utilized such techniques as double exposure (different images exposed on the same film), mattes, fades, slow and fast motion, animation, and miniature models. Méliès created film fantasies that were the forerunners of science-fiction movies. Some of his films, such as A Trip to the Moon (1902), were popular throughout the world and influenced many subsequent filmmakers.

From a private collection

While Méliès staged many of his films indoors, English filmmakers developed fiction films shot outdoors and pioneered the chase film. Edwin S. Porter, a camera operator and director at Edison’s studio, combined Méliès’s storytelling form with the English chase. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) abandoned a purely chronological sequence of events, showing in succession different actions that occurred simultaneously. For this immensely popular film, Porter had the actors in outdoor scenes move toward and away from the camera, and he mounted the camera for a time on the roof of a train.

Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive, New York City

By the turn of the century, motion pictures had become an entertainment primarily for the working class and the poorly educated. In the United States, films moved out of vaudeville houses and arcades into storefront theaters that charged a nickel for admission. The Thomas Talley Theater opened in Los Angeles in 1902, and within a few years, there were thousands of “nickelodeons” all over the country. The basic fare of the nickelodeon was one- or two-reel comedies and melodramas.

The Early Film Industry

In the United States, film production was first centered on New York City and Chicago, Ill., but the varied and impressive scenery and sunny climate of southern California soon attracted film crews. William Selig built the first permanent studio in the Los Angeles area in 1909. Many independent producers began to work in southern California in order to avoid the restrictive influence in the eastern United States of the Motion Picture Patents Company, a trust incorporated by 10 companies on Sept. 9, 1908. For about 10 years, until the trust was dissolved by court order, it attempted to control the American film industry by regulating film length, admission prices and film rental fees, salaries, and production standards. The trust was largely responsible for limiting American film production to short melodramas and comedies.

In continental Europe, however, producers began turning out five- and 10-reel films of literary classics and made the first experiments with feature films. Features of the French company Film d’Art starred noted stage performers in famous roles. In 1912 Adolph Zukor, an independent American exhibitor, defied the trust by importing Queen Elizabeth, a four-reel Film d’Art production starring the French stage actress Sarah Bernhardt. In 1913 another importer presented Quo Vadis?, a spectacular Italian feature in nine reels.

The success of such films helped weaken the control of the trust and encouraged American filmmakers to produce more ambitious pictures. Zukor formed the Famous Players Company, which, like Film d’Art, presented stage performers in films.

Silent Film Matures

The potential of silent film was developed primarily by D.W. Griffith, a young American actor who began his directing career by filming melodramas. In the many one- and two-reel films he produced between 1908 and 1913, he experimented with camera and editing techniques. In 1913 he defied orders to make only two-reel films by secretly filming a four-reel spectacle, Judith of Bethulia. In 1915 he released the first film epic, The Birth of a Nation (first shown under the title The Clansman), which ran almost three hours. Despite its blatant racism, this film remains a classic of the American cinema.

Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive, New York

Museum of Modern Art, Film Stills Archive

Griffith further developed such techniques as the intercutting of parallel action, the extreme wide-angle shot, the thematic close-up, and the construction of scenes from fragmentary shots taken at different angles. He introduced both backlighting and reflectors to kill shadows. He was also one of the first filmmakers to plan a recorded musical accompaniment keyed carefully to the entire film. The Birth of a Nation was widely popular, established film as an art form, and set new standards for American filmmaking. Some of Griffith’s other major films were Intolerance (1916), Broken Blossoms (1919), Way Down East (1920), and Orphans of the Storm (1922).

The demand of audiences for longer films and the desire of creative filmmakers to work in their own way led Griffith and others to form their own production companies. In about 1910 such independent producers began promoting their leading players as stars—a practice the trust had avoided in order to keep down players’ salaries. Noted stage actors were offered large sums to appear in films, and Griffith and others trained many performers to be screen stars. To meet increased production costs, the film industry sought a new audience—the middle class—by showing films in large, comfortable theaters. The opening of the ornate 3,300-seat Strand Theater on Broadway in 1914 ushered in the era of the vast and luxurious “movie palace.”

Producer and director Mack Sennett created popular silent slapstick comedies that employed techniques developed by Griffith. Some of Sennett’s comedians—such as Charlie Chaplin, Ben Turpin, Fatty Arbuckle, Ford Sterling, and Mabel Normand—became top-ranking stars. Chaplin also became renowned as a director of his own films, which ran counter to the trend for longer pictures; he did not make a feature-length film until 1921. He also emphasized characters rather than performers-as-personalities, as with his own classic screen alter ego, the Little Tramp.

Another noted director and producer of the time was Thomas H. Ince. As head of the largest studio in Hollywood, Ince evolved the detailed script as a means of controlling every aspect of production. His organization of studio operations into an efficient, businesslike system was adopted by most other studios. He was best-noted for producing exciting Westerns starring William S. Hart.

World War I and After

From a private collection

By the beginning of World War I in 1914, films were being made in most European countries and in Japan, as well as in the United States. When the war interrupted European filmmaking, the American film industry began to dominate the world market. Between 1917 and 1927 the silent film reached the peak of its development. Hollywood films became increasingly expensive to make, as productions became more lavish and spectacular and as stars demanded enormous salaries—and sometimes part of the profits. More and more movie palaces were built, and the major producers expanded their distribution systems and bought entire chains of theaters.

From a private collection

Major American studios attempted to produce a picture a week. A typical film show consisted of a feature starring big-name players, a short comedy, and a newsreel. Such spectacles as Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1923) were popular exceptions and ran for several hours. Most of the films made during this period reflected the fast pace and materialistic concerns of the nation’s prosperous “flapper” era. While settings and costumes were often elaborate, film stories tended to be shallow. Most people went to the “movies” to see film stars, who often saved poor films from total failure. Some stars, seeking freedom from the tyranny of the large studios’ mass-production methods, banded together to form distributing companies to market films they made in their own production studios. United Artists, formed in 1919 by Griffith, Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford, became known for its high standards.

Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive, New York City

From a private collection

In most European countries the production of films gained momentum once more after World War I. The most innovative and influential new European filmmakers appeared in Germany, Scandinavia, and the Soviet Union. In Germany such directors as F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu, 1922), G.W. Pabst (Pandora’s Box, 1929), Fritz Lang (Metropolis, 1927), and Ernst Lubitsch (The Loves of Pharaoh, 1921) created films that ranged from spectacular features based on history, literature, and mythology to modern social parables. Some directors created a powerful realism on film. Others were known for experiments in expressionism—an approach that uses techniques such as distortion of spatial relationships and shadowy, fantastic lighting to depict subjective responses to events and objects. The enormous production facilities of the government-run UFA (Universum-Film Aktien Gesellschaft) studio in Berlin enabled most films to be made indoors. Innovators at the large German studios also created new techniques in camera movement and staging.

The Danish director Carl Dreyer was made famous with The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). Swedish film became known for its fine artistic directors, such as Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller, both of whose films reflected a characteristic Swedish mysticism and intense love of nature.

In contrast with the Germans, Soviet filmmakers preferred natural settings and used ordinary people as cast members. From the start, Soviet films were closely related to the propaganda efforts of the Communist regime. Vladimir Lenin, the Soviet premier, recognized film as the best way to reach the people. Such Soviet directors as Sergey Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Aleksandr Dovzhenko, and Lev Kuleshov produced film masterpieces inspired by revolutionary fervor. In Eisenstein’s Potemkin (1925) and Pudovkin’s The End of St. Petersburg (1927)—both influenced by Griffith’s American films—the film montage underwent major development. In the editing technique of montage, a rapid succession of film images, often seemingly unrelated, is constructed to illustrate an association of ideas or create a strong psychological effect.

During the 1920s, the avant-garde film movement became prominent in France. Much of its work was experimental and related to other art forms and to the impressionist, surrealist, and Dadaist movements in literature and painting. Such films as An Andalusian Dog (1928), by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, and The Blood of a Poet (1930), by Jean Cocteau, were shocking and perplexing to most film audiences of the time. But they were forerunners of the underground, or experimental, film movement of the 1960s.

Sound Comes to the Screen

Early efforts to synchronize phonograph records with films went without success. The year 1902 saw the introduction of subtitles—printed dialogue snippets and descriptions of the action inserted as separate frames. Some film exhibitors devised machines to emit sound effects behind the screen; others hired actors to read aloud during the film. In early movie theaters, musical accompaniments were provided by pianists and organists, who tried to match their selections to the mood and pace of the on-screen action. Full orchestras accompanied some of the more spectacular silent films in the larger theaters.

Sound films became possible through the development of the means to record sound directly on film and of the Audion amplifier, which provided sufficient volume of sound for large theaters. Both of these developments were pioneered by Lee De Forest, who exhibited brief sound films to the public in 1923. Although the public failed to respond to De Forest’s sound films, electronics manufacturers continued to experiment with both sound-on-film and phonograph discs synchronized with film. (See alsoradio.)

Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive, New York City

In 1926 Warner Brothers released a program using synchronized discs; it included short talking and musical films and a silent feature, Don Juan, with a synchronized musical accompaniment. In 1927 William Fox released a short sound-on-film comedy with spoken dialogue and then the first sound newsreels. Public acceptance of sound films came after Warner Brothers presented Al Jolson singing and saying a few words in The Jazz Singer in October 1927. The first full-length all-sound film was The Lights of New York, issued by Warner Brothers in 1928.

The success of sound revolutionized the film industry. By 1931 few silent films were being made in the United States and Europe, and synchronized discs had been abandoned in favor of the superior sound-on-film process. Theaters had to install sound-projection equipment, and film studios had to find methods of soundproofing cameras and stages. Movement in most of the early sound films appeared static, because cameras had to be enclosed in soundproof boxes that were difficult to move. Eventually cameras with noiseless gears were developed; microphones were put on booms, or poles, which could be extended as needed; and dollies and other means of moving the camera were even more widely used.

The sound revolution ended the careers of many silent-film performers whose voices did not record well, but it also brought new performers to the screen who had stage-acting experience. Playwrights, who knew how to write dramatic dialogue, were hired to replace silent-screen scenario writers, and many plays provided ready-made material for the new film format.

The Introduction of Color

Movies filmed in color were introduced at about the same time as sound films. In the early 1900s color could be used only by applying it to black-and-white film after shooting—by techniques such as hand coloring, stenciling, or tinting. In the 1920s the Technicolor Corporation introduced a process that used two separate films in a special camera, each recording the image of a primary color. After development, the two negatives were printed together on a composite color print. Technicolor perfected a better, three-color process in 1932. It was expensive to use, however, and in the late 1940s less than 12 percent of full-length Hollywood films were produced in color.

Color was more widely adopted after 1950, when the Eastman Kodak Company introduced a single-strip film with three separate layers of emulsion, each sensitive to a different part of the spectrum. Use of this color film required no special equipment. Within a couple of years, more than half of all American feature films were made in color, and more than 90 percent were by 1970.

The 1930s and 1940s

Warner Bros., Inc.

During the first decade of sound film, filmmakers learned to use the camera and the sound track as creative elements that complemented each other in building the action of a story. Writers, directors, and actors learned how to create subtler and more natural screen characterizations. This new era of sound was also the era of large-scale film production under the “studio system” in Hollywood. By 1930 eight large movie studios controlled the production and distribution of nearly all films made in the United States. Five of the studios owned large theater chains and so also controlled the exhibition of their films.

Filmmakers produced a variety of different kinds of films to satisfy the growing audience of sound pictures. Among the most popular were musical comedies. Following the first all-musical film, The Broadway Melody (1929), Hollywood further developed the musical in Busby Berkeley’s elaborately staged dance sequences, as in 42nd Street (1933), and in the song-and-dance films of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, such as Top Hat (1935). The new dimension of sound also made demands on Hollywood comedies, specifically, for deft verbal humor. The Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, and Mae West became highly popular sound comedians.

Gangster and suspense films, Westerns (with and without singing cowboys), films dealing with social problems, horror stories, and films based on novels appeared in cycles throughout the 1930s. In 1939 one of the most popular films in motion-picture history, Gone with the Wind, was released. It tells the story of the American Civil War through the experience of a spoiled Southern belle. Walt Disney produced the first animated sound cartoon, Steamboat Willie, in 1928 and the first feature-length cartoon, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in 1937.

Among the leading American directors of the period was John Ford, renowned for his Westerns and other films of mythic dimension, including The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Stagecoach (1939), My Darling Clementine (1946), and The Quiet Man (1952). Another major figure was Frank Capra, whose screwball comedies and fantasies of faith, kindness, and the common man included It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).

The only woman to direct feature-length Hollywood films during this period, Dorothy Arzner, produced films with independent, strong-willed female protagonists, including Christopher Strong (1933) and Dance, Girl, Dance (1940). Arzner also made an immense contribution to sound in film when she invented the “boom mike,” a long pole with a microphone attached. Unlike a stationary mike, it follows the actors around, allowing them mobility while itself remaining out of camera range.

Courtesy of RKO Radio Pictures, a division of RKO General; photograph from the Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive, New York

The most extraordinary film to emerge from the studio system was Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), a portrait of a media magnate based on William Randolph Hearst. Its controversial theme and experimental technique made it a classic. Welles pioneered innovations in dialogue, flashback narrative techniques, camera work, and music.

Alfred Hitchcock began his brilliant directorial career in England, with such classic suspense films as The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The Thirty-nine Steps (1935), and The Lady Vanishes (1938). After he moved to Hollywood in 1939, he was able to capitalize on the style and major actors that big budgets bought him in order to make many more elegant thrillers, including Rebecca (1940), Spellbound (1945), Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1954), North by Northwest (1959), and Psycho (1960).

European filmmakers produced many sound pictures, many of which were imported successfully into the United States. In France, René Clair’s work was noted for humor, burlesque, and often for surrealistic fantasy. His innovations in sound were featured in such films as Under the Roofs of Paris (1930) and Freedom for Us (1931). French director Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion (1937) appeals movingly for human understanding. Although Josef von Sternberg immigrated to the United States as a boy, he did important work in the German cinema, such as The Blue Angel (1930), starring the sultry Marlene Dietrich. German director Fritz Lang contributed the classic M (1931), which used nonnaturalistic sound to set off and play against its visual images. Among the many popular English imports were Pygmalion (1938), Night Train (1940), and Major Barbara (1941).

In the Soviet Union most gifted filmmakers were controlled or ruined by the government. But Eisenstein was able to express his genius in the historical epics Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible (Part One, 1944; Part Two, completed 1946, released 1958), which subtly criticized the oppressive rule of Joseph Stalin.

War once again seriously curtailed film production in Europe during World War II (1939–45). In England filmmakers turned to the documentary film to report on the war and to strengthen morale. Throughout the war, England, Germany, the United States, and Japan used film for propaganda purposes, for training armed services, and for unifying civilians. In Nazi Germany filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl made impressive and creative use of sound and montage in two propaganda epics commissioned by Adolf Hitler, Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938).

During the war, Americans especially attended films in greater numbers than ever before, bringing new prosperity to the American film industry. Pictures of actual combat in newsreels led to greater realism in fictional films.

Postwar Films in the United States

The American film industry continued to prosper immediately after the war, but television had begun to reduce film audiences significantly by 1950. With rising production costs and increased controls over film distribution—including a court order requiring production companies to divest themselves of theater chains—the industry experienced a major financial crisis. During the 1950s, many American studios tried to cut costs by making films abroad, where labor was cheaper. Eventually the studios began to release their films for showing on television and to make films specifically for television.

Hollywood’s main attempt to attract a new audience was the introduction of wide-screen and three-dimensional films. Cinerama, invented by Fred Waller and introduced in 1952, required three cameras, a curved screen, and a stereophonic sound system. One 3-D process, introduced in 1953, was based on the principle of the stereoscope and required the use of special glasses. The 3-D effects, however, never achieved much more than novelty status. The wide-screen process CinemaScope, also introduced in 1953, had been invented by French physicist Henri Chrétien 25 years earlier. It used one camera with a special wide-angle lens (called an anamorphic lens) to horizontally condense the image on the film and a special projector lens to spread the image out again on the screen. Other big-screen processes included VistaVision and Todd-AO. VistaVision was first used in White Christmas (1954), and Todd-AO in Oklahoma! (1955). Later, a similar process made by Panavision was widely adopted.

To fill their big screens, film companies produced lavish Westerns, historical and biblical epics, and musicals. Typical of the new spectaculars were The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben-Hur (1959), and Cleopatra (1963). Although some of the spectaculars made tremendous profits, the production costs of such films also set new records.

While major producers were making big pictures, there was a growing trend among the independent and newer filmmakers toward more serious, mature, and artistic pictures. Many of them worked with low budgets, new film techniques, and controversial subjects. They found their audience largely in the small theaters that had sprung up in major cities and university communities during the 1950s to exhibit foreign films. By 1960 some Hollywood studios were also making films for this audience.

The 1960s in the United States saw a surge in what are variously called underground, experimental, or avant-garde films. Most of these films were conceived and made by a single individual as a personal statement or artistic endeavor. They differed radically from conventional films in form and content, and often in the techniques used in filming.

The underground film had its origins in the turn-of-the-century films of Georges Méliès and in the avant-garde film movements in France and Germany during the 1920s. In France the avant-garde film movement was influenced by visual artists such as Man Ray, Fernand Léger, and Marcel Duchamp, who turned to film as an extension of painting, as well as by directors such as Buñuel, Cocteau, and Renoir. The German avant-garde movement was an outgrowth of expressionist feature films, such as Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), and of the film experiments of the painters Hans Richter, Walter Ruttmann, and Viking Eggeling.

The most significant development in American avant-garde cinema in the late 1960s was the structural film, in which form is stressed and the role of content minimized. A fixed, passive camera and editing to achieve repetitive visual rhythms are characteristic of this approach. Andy Warhol’s Sleep (1963) is an early example. In contrast to the poetic and dreamlike films of the 1950s underground, Warhol depicted not dreams but simply six hours of a man sleeping. Other major avant-garde filmmakers include Stan Vanderbeek (Breathdeath, 1963–64), Kenneth Anger (Scorpio Rising, 1962–64), and Stan Brakhage (Dog Star Man, 1964). With the introduction of portable video cameras and recording equipment, video art evolved from the underground film movement.

Postwar International Developments

Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive, New York City

The most significant and influential developments in filmmaking after World War II occurred in Europe. In Italy, Roberto Rossellini’s Open City (1945) and Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine (1946) and The Bicycle Thief (1948) established a trend toward realism in film. Shunning contrived plots and upbeat themes, these directors took their cameras into the streets to make films showing the harshness of life in the aftermath of war. De Sica fused documentary and dramatic techniques to make personal statements about the world he saw around him.

Riama Film and Pathé Consortium Cinéma; photograph from a private collection

This use of film as a medium of personal artistic expression was further developed by such directors as Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni. These directors’ films examined both the inner lives of their characters and the society in which they lived. In a career that produced such major films as La Strada (1954), La Dolce vita (1960), Fellini Satyricon (1969), and Amarcord (1974), Fellini created works marked variously by realistic plots, surrealist fantasy, philosophical themes, poetic imagery, and symbolism. Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960), by dispensing with formal plot and emphasizing the nuances of human relationships, represented a new age of cinema. His subsequent work—including such films as Blow-Up (1966), Zabriskie Point (1970), and The Passenger (1975)—continued to probe the emptiness of modern life and the disintegration of personal relationships and the sense of self.

In France a new generation of young filmmakers, called the New Wave, emerged in the 1950s. They held that the director is the major creative force in film—the auteur (“author”) of the film. They stressed characterization, often at the expense of plot, and developed new techniques with the handheld camera and new forms of visual storytelling through individualized editing. Like the Italians, some of them used poetic visual images, philosophical ideas, and social commentary in their films.

Courtesy of Janus Films, Inc.; photograph, from the Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive, New York City

French director Jean-Luc Godard—known for such films as Breathless (1960) and Week-End (1967)—became more politically radical through the years, though he ultimately returned to theatrical filmmaking in the late 20th century. François Truffaut, the most commercially successful of the New Wave directors, drew praise for his finely drawn characters in The 400 Blows (1959), Shoot the Piano Player (1960), Fahrenheit 451 (1967), Day for Night (1972), and Small Change (1976). Other important French filmmakers included René Clément, Alain Resnais, Robert Bresson, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette.

In England filmmakers continued to develop the genres of comedy—in such films as Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and The Horse’s Mouth (1958)—and literary adaptation—as in Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (1948) and David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946). But in reaction to the predictable conservatism and elitism they perceived in existing British film, some younger filmmakers produced work fresh in form and content, usually on a limited budget. Director Tony Richardson’s Look Back in Anger (1959) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) exemplified the new realism of these filmmakers, whose work came to be known as the New Cinema or social realism.

The social realists brought such prestige to the British film industry that for a time London became the production capital of the Western world. The country produced such international hits as Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963), John Schlesinger’s Darling (1965) and Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), and Richard Lester’s two Beatles films, A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965). Films by non-British directors, such as Polish-born Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) and American Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) and A Clockwork Orange (1971), also were produced in England.

Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive, New York City

Individual directors in other countries also influenced contemporary filmmaking. The Swedish director Ingmar Bergman used simple, dramatic stories and allegories to explore complex philosophical, social, and psychological issues. His major films include The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957), Persona (1966), Cries and Whispers (1972), and Fanny and Alexander (1984).

The most influential Spanish director, Luis Buñuel, worked in exile during much of the oppressive regime of Francisco Franco, making films in Mexico, France, and the United States. Among his sardonic and highly original satires of social and religious institutions and sexual obsession are The Golden Age (1930), Nazarín (1958), Viridiana (1961), The Exterminating Angel (1962), and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1973).

With Rashomon (1950), Japanese director Akira Kurosawa became the first Asian filmmaker to have a significant worldwide impact. He used universal themes played out in historic Asian settings. Some of his films retell Shakespearean stories in classical Japanese settings. The first films that were successful abroad in interpreting life in India from an Indian viewpoint were director Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy: The Song of the Road (1955), The Unvanquished (1956), and The World of Apu (1959).

Filmmaking in the Soviet Union continued to be dictated by the Communist party policy of socialist realism, which prescribed very limited, state-approved subjects. Russian cinema saw a gradual revitalization, however, under the new policy of glasnost (“openness”) in the mid-1980s and the subsequent dissolution of Communism. In the Communist nations of Poland and Czechoslovakia, filmmakers had been able to develop relatively independently, and many of their films stressed social and political issues. Among the notable Polish films were Kanal (1957) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958), directed by Andrzej Wajda; Knife in the Water (1963), directed by Polanski; and Camera Buff (1979), directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski. Notable Czechoslovak films included The Shop on Main Street (1966), directed by Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos, and Closely Watched Trains (1968), directed by Jirí Menzel.

Postwar European film influenced filmmaking in the United States by presenting new techniques and subject matter and by creating a larger audience for serious and artistic motion pictures. In addition, American film producers invested money in European films and formed partnerships abroad. The films they made helped introduce European film personalities and ideas to American audiences.

When American film production began to slow down in the 1950s, foreign films were imported to fill the need for box-office attractions. At the same time, American producers seeking new markets exported their films. Coproduction of films by two or more countries is now common in Europe, and many American films are shot abroad. Most contemporary films are made with an international audience in mind.

Recent American and International Cinema

By the late 1960s Hollywood had fallen behind the other major national film industries artistically, commercially, and even technically. A series of increasingly expensive attempts to lure back the television audience brought the industry to the edge of financial collapse in the early 1970s. To save themselves, studios had become involved in television production and had begun backing and distributing more and more films by such independent producer-directors as Kubrick and Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde, 1967).

Young directors from television, such as Sidney Lumet (The Pawnbroker, 1965), entered the industry. They were followed closely by the first generation of American directors trained in film schools, including Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. With such blockbusters as Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) and Lucas’ Star Wars films, this generation helped reinvigorate Hollywood. Their technical sophistication and sense of film history enabled them to produce cinematic thrills and enormous profits—as well as some films with both artistic merit and entertainment value.

Production costs of American films rose astronomically, but so did the profits realized from hit movies. By the 1980s even films unsuccessful in theaters could often show a profit through pay television and home videotape sales and rentals. American films once again dominated the international entertainment market.

A number of far-reaching technological developments of the 1960s helped shape modern filmmaking. The perfection and wide use of handheld 35-millimeter cameras permitted continuous and spontaneous on-location shooting. Wide-angle lenses made it possible to film relatively large subjects at close range—as in small rooms and automobiles. The telephoto lens allowed long-distance close-ups and optical tracking shots in which the camera seems to move past a subject but in fact only swivels on its support. The 1970s films of American director Robert Altman contain numerous examples of such innovative use of lenses. Altman also pioneered multitrack sound-recording methods, which made possible the realistic overlapping dialogue of such films as his M*A*S*H (1970) and Nashville (1975).

In the late 1970s video technology began to revolutionize film editing and the production of special and visual effects. Steven Spielberg’s science-fiction, thriller, and adventure films—for example, Jaws (1975), E.T.—the Extraterrestrial (1982), and the Indiana Jones series—exploited the full range of available film technology. Major developments in computer-generated animation and visual effects were employed in such action blockbusters as the Matrix (1999–2003) and Lord of the Rings (2001–03) trilogies as well as in wholly animated features such as Toy Story (1995).

The traditional genres, or types, of film storytelling established in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s have undergone changes but remain the forms in which most of the more successful American films are made. A brief selection of some notable examples since 1965 includes such science-fiction films as Kubrick’s epic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977); such Westerns as Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) and Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992), which revived the genre; and Spielberg’s Holocaust story Schindler’s List (1993). In the gangster genre were Coppola’s Mafia saga The Godfather (in three parts, 1972, 1974, and 1990); Quentin Tarantino’s hard-boiled crime comedy Pulp Fiction (1994); and Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973)—which, like his Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980), was a fascinating study in gritty realism and brutality. Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) revived the 1940s film noir style, while Ridley Scott’s visually stunning Blade Runner (1982) combined the film noir and science-fiction styles.

Some American directors working outside Hollywood have created more personal, nonformula types of films like those developed in Europe during the postwar period. Among the most original of these independent, or “indie,” filmmakers was writer, director, and actor Woody Allen. From early joke-driven but sophisticated farces such as Take the Money and Run (1969), Bananas (1971), and Sleeper (1973), through his middle-period seriocomic films Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979), Allen refused to sacrifice his individualistic approach to Hollywood’s emphasis on moneymaking. His quirky films of the late 20th century—including Zelig (1983), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), and the musical Everybody Says I Love You (1996)—met with variable success, but his work continued to command the attention of film enthusiasts.

African American director Spike Lee brought his distinctive talents and perspective and, usually, controversial subject matter to mainstream film audiences in pictures such as She’s Gotta Have It (1986), Do the Right Thing (1989), Malcolm X (1992), Clockers (1995), and He Got Game (1998). Many of his films dealt head-on with issues of race and racism in the United States—as with interracial relationships in Jungle Fever (1991) and the diversity of opinions within the black community in Get on the Bus (1996).

AF archive/Alamy

A major development of the 1960s and ’70s was the emergence of Third World Cinema (or Third Cinema)—a product of developing nations in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, many of which were under colonial domination until after World War II. The term is applied especially to works intended to raise national consciousness or effect social change. The most influential Third World filmmakers usually operate independently of their nations’ commercial film industries. They often work collectively and sometimes work secretly to avoid punishment by their governments. In Brazil the Cinema Nôvo, or New Cinema, produced internationally acclaimed feature films; Algerian director Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1975 for his Chronicle of the Years of Embers; and Ousmane Sembène of Senegal produced a rich body of work.

German film experienced a rebirth in the 1970s. The New German Cinema was the work of young filmmakers who grew up in an Americanized and prosperous postwar West Germany. The directors who laid the foundation for this rebirth were Volker Schlöndorff and Alexander Kluge. Three other filmmakers became far better known in the 1970s: Rainer Werner Fassbinder (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, 1972), who was the most flamboyant and melodramatic of the three; Werner Herzog (Aguirre, the Wrath of God, 1972), who tended toward the mystical and spiritual; and Wim Wenders (Kings of the Road, 1976), who dealt with rootlessness and the quest for meaning and identity. Later, filmmaker Wolfgang Petersen earned international acclaim for Das Boot (The Boat, 1982), set in the claustrophobic confines of a World War II U-boat.

During the 1970s and ’80s, England underwent a talent drain, with many actors and directors defecting to Hollywood. But British cinema saw another resurgence beginning in the late 20th century, as demonstrated by such internationally celebrated films as A Room with a View (1986), The Crying Game (1992), Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Trainspotting (1996), Secrets and Lies (1996), and The Full Monty (1997).

Filmmakers in Spain enjoyed greater freedom after Franco’s death in 1975. Among the new generation of Spanish directors who began working in the 1970s were Victor Erice, Pilar Miró, and Pedro Almodóvar, the last of whom achieved international recognition for such innovative, irreverent films as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) and All About My Mother (1999).

Bac Films, Makhmalbaf Productions

The government of Iran banned filmmaking for a time after the revolution of 1979 and later heavily censored films. With some loosening of restrictions in the 1990s, however, Iran’s film industry emerged as one of the world’s finest. Among the varied themes explored by such internationally acclaimed directors as Abbas Kiarostami (The Wind Will Carry Us, 1999), Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Kandahar, 2001), Majid Majidi (The Children of Heaven, 1997), and Jafar Panahi (The Circle, 2000) were the world of childhood, the beauty of nature, and the repression of women.

During the 1980s and ’90s, Japan produced more films annually than any country in the world. But quantity far outweighed quality, and most serious productions, such as Kurosawa’s Kagemusha (1980), had to be funded abroad. In the early 21st century, however, some Japanese directors’ handling of the horror genre began to pique international interest. Hideo Nakata’s 1998 film Ringu prompted Gore Verbinski’s higher-tech American interpretation, The Ring (2002), which in turn generated interest in the Japanese original. Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-on (2000) so inspired American producers that they had him remake it in an English-language version, The Grudge (2004). In an era of expensive, technologically generated chills and thrills, both films were impressive for the low-tech effects and camera work the directors used to tell their stories and frighten audiences.

Chan Kam Chuen/Sony Pictures Classic

At the turn of the 21st century, with the relaxing of some restrictions on filmmakers, China produced outstanding young directors such as Zhang Yimou. Many of Zhang’s films centered on political oppression and sexual repression, as in Raise the Red Lantern (1991), and featured lush photography, as in Hero (2002). The most successful Taiwanese director of the period was Ang Lee, whose work often dealt with repressed passions, in films ranging from touching works about intergenerational conflict in families, such as Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), to the stunning literary adaptation Sense and Sensibility (1995), the lavish martial-arts fantasy Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), and the Western Brokeback Mountain (2005), about a forbidden love between two cowboys. Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien was recognized for sensitive family dramas such as Good Men, Good Women (1995).

In India, Satyajit Ray continued to dominate the national art cinema through the 1960s and ’70s with such creative work as The Goddess (1960), Days and Nights in the Forest (1970), and Distant Thunder (1973). The vast majority of Indian cinema, however, was devoted to the unfailingly popular Bollywood entertainments, which typically featured formulaic story lines (usually romantic), expertly choreographed fight scenes, spectacular song-and-dance routines, emotion-charged melodrama, and larger-than-life heroes. Some young Indian filmmakers with more artistic aspirations, however, found success overseas. Director Mira Nair achieved both popular and critical triumph in the United States with a number of films. Nair’s Mississippi Masala (1991) portrays cultural conflicts faced by Indians who moved abroad, and her Monsoon Wedding (2001) is among those which depict her affection for her homeland.

Australia had essentially no film industry until the late 1960s and early ’70s, when the federal government set about actively subsidizing the growth of an authentic national cinema and founded a national film school. The government also offered tax incentives to attract foreign investment. The consequence was a creative explosion that featured native-born casts and crews and treated distinctly Australian themes. Some of the finest results have been in intimate “small films,” such as British-born director John Duigan’s coming-of-age films The Year My Voice Broke (1987) and Flirting (1991) and his lyrical Wide Sargasso Sea (1993). International recognition resulted for such talented Australian directors as Peter Weir (Picnic at Hanging Rock, 1975, and Gallipoli, 1981), Bruce Beresford (Breaker Morant, 1980), George Miller (Mad Max, 1979, and its sequel, The Road Warrior, 1982), Gillian Armstrong (My Brilliant Career, 1979), Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge!, 2001), and P.J. Hogan (Muriel’s Wedding, 1994).

Neighboring New Zealand has also produced prominent filmmaking talent. The New Zealand Film Commission helped launch Peter Jackson’s career, which produced the internationally acclaimed Heavenly Creatures (1994), about two teenage girls who kill one girl’s mother, and escalated to the phenomenally successful Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–03). Filmmaker Jane Campion began as a “maverick” director with such films as An Angel at My Table (1990) but rapidly rose to award-winning status with The Piano (1993).

Worldwide, recent technical and artistic innovations have injected new life into the cinema. In some ways, filmmaking in the early 21st century reminds some of the energy and promise of the very early motion-picture industry.

Want to see it in action?

Start a free trial

E-mail

To

From

Sender NamePlease enter your name.

Sender EmailPlease enter a valid email address.

Translate this page

Choose a language from the menu above to view a computer-translated version of this page. Please note: Text within images is not translated, some features may not work properly after translation, and the translation may not accurately convey the intended meaning. Britannica does not review the converted text.

After translating an article, all tools except font up/font down will be disabled. To re-enable the tools or to convert back to English, click "view original" on the Google Translate toolbar.